For the last two decades, the digital age has invested publishing, taking for its main object 19th century literature, devoid of authorial rights, and whose varied and many publishing venues (journals, newspapers, anthologies, books) lend themselves to the plasticity of a digital support. Given the abundance of research projects in this area, a somewhat naïve vision can be seen to consider digitalisation as the panacea solving all the editorial problems of printed editions. This paper promotes a more nuanced view, through an assessment of the state of research in this field at the moment, including abroad, highlighting what such approaches bring especially in terms of accessibility of sources and reconfiguration of the notion of author, but also pinpointing a certain number of more general problems, concerning the frailty of the archives, the risks of going towards ever more quantitative approaches, and the difficulties in enriching the texts with a critical apparatus.